Occasionally Offensive

Cover Art: Emily’s Fifth Birthday

I’ve been working on using Gimp to make cover art for a pair of my short stories that I intend to publish soon. I’ve never used Gimp or Photoshop before, but I had a copy of Gimp that I downloaded when a friend raved about how much she loved it. I found it quite difficult to get used to, frankly. One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is how to move the piece that you want to move, instead of moving the background.

I started with the photo of the flowers. It doesn’t have much to do with the story, but I own the rights to this photo, and it’s pretty and eye-catching. I tried to use the gimp word tools to add the words, but they didn’t have enough options, so instead I did it in Powerpoint and copied and pasted it over. My husband had to give me a tutorial to help me figure out the scaling, but I think I’ve got it now.

The first version of this didn’t have the black, just the white text. I looked at some other book covers, and thought that having a dark stripe behind the text would bring it to the fore a little better. Instead of making it solid black, I used the transparency feature at 71%. In my opinion, the transparency feature is the number one thing that makes Gimp (and other similar programs) worth using. You just can’t get the same overlapping layered effect using physical media. Not really.

The short story pair is up on Smashwords right now. It’s currently 99 cents. Here’s the link to download it.